Archives for March, 2010

I learned from a couple of colleagues (who I won’t name) a couple of facts that reinforce just how hypocritical, hateful, and inane animal rights activists can be. First, the terrorists are still targeting researcher Dario Ringach. Ringach, a former primate researcher, left the field due to violent pressure from these assholes. He’s done. He…

Mark Crislip has a nice piece up at Science-Based Medicine about the battle against the medical “de-lightenment”. In his post, he looks at some data about what sorts of criteria anti-vaccinationists use in their propaganda. Not surprisingly, appeals to emotion and to pre-existing beliefs are much more common than actual facts. The question then becomes,…

Our beloved, beat-up laptop is ill–very ill. The family is considering consenting to a Do Not Resuscitate order. Symptoms of this grave illness include inability to exit the start up screen and freezing up in “safe mode”. The agonal Blue Screen of Death has not yet appeared, but is believed to be immanent.

A few months ago, attorney Ames Grawert and I wrote about a defamation case filed by noted anti-vaccine crank Barbara Loe Fisher against respected journalist Amy Wallace, vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit, and Conde Nast. The suit arose from a statement by Offit in an excellent article by Wallace. At one point in the lengthy…

The other day I told you about a doctor promoting a dietary supplement for the treatment of HIV, despite the lack of any significant data to support his claims. If there’s anything medical bloggers have found over the years is that woo rarely walks alone. In my post I expressed some incredulity at the fact…

I was pleased to see that Dr. Kaiser responded to post from earlier this week. If you’ll recall, Dr. Jon Kaiser is a doctor in California who is promoting a nutritional supplement to help treat HIV disease. I was hoping his response would be substantive, containing references to data I had missed in my research…

I get all sorts of mail. I get mail from whining Scientologists, suffering patients, angry quacks—and I get lots of promotional material. I get letters from publishers wanting me to review books, letters from pseudo-bloggers wanting me to plug their advertiblog—really, just about anything you can imagine. Most of the time I just hit “delete”;…

For some reason I’m really excited about tomorrow’s post. I don’t usually write very far ahead of time, but this one took a little bit of extra research. You see, I got this letter from a PR firm hyping some altmed doc, and it was much more interesting than the usual similar things I get.…

Things have been rather busy at Pal’s place. For whatever reason, the complexity of patients has been pretty high lately, so I haven’t had a chance to get in my usual once or twice a day post. I’m told that “back in the day” internal medicine patients were a bit less complicated. These days, to…

Sexual violence is a huge problem in the US. Among college-age women, for example, 20-25% report an attempted or completed rape while in college. Assault itself is prevalent enough to constitute a major public health problem, but add to that the sequelae—STIs, PTSD, fear, etc.—and sexual assault isn’t just a major public health problem; it’s…